Posts Tagged ‘Tumblr’

When building a blog, it is important to take time to choose the best and most appropriate blog platform for your needs. If you do a quick search on the different types of platforms, you’ll see that WordPress is highly regarded by blog owners due to a variety of reasons.

However, if you want to make an informed decision to the type of platform to use for your blog and not because of what is believed to the best, then read on.

Editor’s note: This post was written by Larry Alton, an independent business consultant specializing in social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

As a business owner, you know that blogging is arguably the best platform to actually engage with your audience. It’s how they put a face to a business, how you can foster relationships, and a great source for dishing up quality content that can help bolster your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. You have blogging down, or at least you know how important it is, but suddenly the world is buzzing with “micro blogging” and you might feel like everything you knew about blogs has gone down the tubes.

Micro blogging refers to the fast, frequent sharing of bite sized information via a certain platform. Most often, it’s used to send or receive updates from posts that are based in text (in other words, memes and short Vine-esque videos don’t qualify as micro blogging quite yet as they’re image-based and not text-based). However, that’s changed in recent months and now some experts consider just about anything fodder for micro blogs whether it’s audio, text, video or images. Once the content is uploaded to a site like Twitter, it’s sent to members so the “group” is automatically notified of the microblog. Read More

With the 10-year anniversary of the first release of WordPress coming up on May 25 of this year, a lot of attention is already being paid to the reigning champion of the blogging platforms and both how it changed the Internet and how the Internet changed around it.

On the other hand, it’s easy to look at WordPress as a besieged king. An application and a service created in a world of desktops and blogs now living in a world of mobile devices and social media.

It’s obvious that WordPress has helped to shape the Web we’re in today. It’s used by millions of blogs large and small, including many of the most popular sites on the Web. However, the question remains, will WordPress and the WordPress platform be as important in the next ten years as it has been the previous?

It’s tough to say, but I agree with Matt Mullenweg that there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic.

The internet has turned the world in to one giant, interconnected beast. This web delivers information to humanity at a rate never before reached in all of human history. Because of this, every business should have some kind of presence on the World Wide Web. This can be a web page, a Facebook page, or even presence on a site like Tumblr or WordPress. Regardless of the route a company takes, there will be blog posts. These posts are pieces of prose that must be both informative and entertaining. This is the face of the business many will see so posting should be handled with care. The following are eight simple rules for writing a blog post. Read More

Earlier this week, we’ve discussed techniques for managing blog content and design. Now that you’ve mastered these essential topics, it’s time to focus on developing your followers. Here are my stand-by techniques for promoting your Tumblr or your Blogger (or both!) after you’ve created a well-designed blog with quality content.

1. Tumblr

The “Ask” Box
On Tumblr, the Ask box is your best tool if you want to get followers. You can use it to create relationships, ask bloggers to check out your blog and drive traffic to your blog. One word of caution—do not be insincere when you ask people to check out your blog. One of the most disappointing messages a blogger can receive is “Hey, I love your blog, do you mind checking mine out?” because it’s clear that the compliment is hollow. Bloggers understand that you want to gain followers, so be direct and ask them to check out your blog—they will understand what you are trying to do and they will look at your blog. Bloggers have feelings too! Read More

Tumblr is a fast moving blogging platform. Tumblr allows users a lot of freedom and ease in customizing the layouts and HTML code, so users generate the majority of the trends. The tools are supplied to us and it’s up to us to make use of them. When you start a Tumblr (or if you already have one!) don’t hold back in diving right into the HTML of your theme and finding your way around the other blogs and tools Tumblr has. Read More

Bloggers who use simple web interfaces to publish their content are split into two major factions: the Blogger team and the Tumblr team. They could not be more different in their design, posting style and promotion tactics. If you want to start a blog but don’t know which platform to use, first decide what the focus of your blog will be: Writing? Images? Curating others’ content? Do you want an informative blog and write about restaurants, traveling or technology? Or do you want something a little more creative, focused on images?

Let’s explore the head-to-head pros and cons of Blogger and Tumblr for the aspiring blog editor. Read More

Bloggers love to argue about what is the best blogging platform. Whether they’re backers of WordPress, BlogSpot, Tumblr, Posterous, MovableType or a custom solution, there are very good bloggers who are strong believers in all of the major tools.

The simple truth is that every blogging platform is a perfectly fine way to run your blog. They all succeed in doing the major task of putting your words, images, etc. online. While they have different features, strengths and weaknesses, you can easily run a good blog with just about any platform you choose.

Unfortunately though, blogging platforms tend to become flavors of the week. As one company or platform draws a lot of attention, many bloggers are tempted to try and ride the wave and move their site to new platforms in a bid to stay on the bleeding edge.

However, this can be catastrophic for a site. Because, while your blogging platform doesn’t determine how good your site is, it does impact your site in other ways. As such, changing platforms, especially doing so routinely, can create serious problems that even a good blog will struggle to overcome.

So, before you chase the latest blogging platform fad, you may want to understand the implications of moving your site and why you might want to think twice before jumping ship. Read More

After partnering with SoundCloud in order to broaden Tumblr’s appeal to music lovers, the micro blogging service is now including a small (but useful) feature that will appeal to hard core photo bloggers.

Although the inclusion of EXIF data will not appeal to the average user, it’s inclusion will excite professional photographers who are (not surprisingly) obsessed with the “hidden” data behind each and every photo.

The inclusion of EXIF may also help Tumblr attract more photo bloggers, as well as give them another reason to use their service over social networks like Instagram, and Twitter (the latter who is jumping into the photo sharing wars).

The feature is only available to Tumblr layouts supporting EXIF tags, which theme developers need to include if they want the camera information to be shown (note: you can also add it as well if you are comfortable with HTML).

For those of you who are photo bloggers, what are your thoughts regarding the inclusion of EXIF?

Would this convince you to use Tumblr as your main photo sharing service or would you consider sticking with services like Flickr instead?

After passing 20 million blogs 11 days ago, the micro blogging service has achieved another milestone as Tumblr now officially hosts more blogs than WordPress.com (a feat they apparently achieved about 24 hours ago).

As of this post over 20.8 million blogs are hosted by Tumblr, compared to about 20.76 million blogs hosted by WordPress.com (the latter who is also witnessing tremendous growth online). Read More